An old temple leans against the green hillside,
The Traveling Palace nestles next to the emerald flow.
Sounds of waters, and the sheen of the mountain locked in the painted tower.
Past memories send my thoughts far away.
Morning rain and clouds return at dusk,
Mist and flowers, in spring as in autumn.
Why should the screeching of the monkeys get so close to the solitary boat?
The traveler has enough sorrows of his own.
translated by Hellmut Wilhelm
Being Present for the Moment
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Leonard Durso 
Beautiful poem. Leonard, what does the Traveling Palace refer to? Is it a royal entourage of some kind, or an actual place/site name?
Counterpoint that sharp loneliness with the late ch’an work of Po Chu-i, (tr. David Hinton):
A day will no doubt come when dust flies at the bottom of seas,
and how can mountaintops avoid the transformation to gravel?
Young lovers may part, a man leaving, setting out on some boat,
but who could say they’ll never come together again one day?
Have a great day, my friend.
Traveling Palace refers to the emperor’s temporary residence while he was away from the capital. It could therefore be any place he stayed while traveling.
And that’s a beautiful poem by Po-Chu-i. That’s a lovely book of his selected poems translated by Hinton. Arthur Waley also translated one called, I think, Singing Wildly in the Mountains or something like that. I don’t have that one with me here but I have an older book of his translations just called Translations from the Chinese that has wonderful illustrations by C. Leroy Baldridge. Do you know it?
Not familiar with that, but have a lot of catching up to do as I have only recently discovered this rich vein of verse, starting with picking up J. P. Seaton’s translations of Han Shan and others (Cold Mountain Poems). The Hinton translation is in Classical Chinese Poetry, trans. and edited by Hinton, focusing on the T’ang and Sung dynasty poets. It caught my eye because of a blurb on the back by my old mentor A.R. Ammons, who apparently was a big fan of Po Ch-i. I can see why!
I don’t know that anthology by Hinton but he also did a book of translations totally devoted to Po Chu-i which is what I thought you were referring to. I have two books of translations here by Waley, the other being 170 Chinese Poems, but both are probably out of print. I got both years ago in a used bookstores. But Waley’s book on Po Chu-i should still be in print.
You might look for The Jade Mountain by Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-hu. It’s the only ttranslated version of the 300 poems from the T’ang Dynasty that school children both in China and Taiwan had to learn poems from. And if you want to dip into the Japanese, look for translations by Burton Watson who also did that book I mentioned in another post on Han-shan called Cold Mountain.
There’s so much really and I have several boxes of Asian literature back in NY which I sorely miss. One day, when I finally decide just where it is I’m going to be, I’ll ship them all there and lose myself in them once again.